jeffie7 said:
you're trying to find vocals for big name songs? if so, unless you know people and run pro tools chances are you'll never ever ever find anything.
You can use a parametric EQ to notch the 2-4khz range. This is where the vocals will be 99% of the time. That is a cheap and fairly effective way to remove them. You will lose some audio quality along the way, but no matter the software, this will be the case. (Even if it is smarter than this notch filter.) This is somehting you can do with almost any shareware audio software.
Most remixes you'll notice the org music playing in the background. they just add a loud ass beat over top it and cover it up.
Hey Jeffie,
Not to be a dick for pointing it out, but a notch filter doesn't attenuate frequencies around a specific bandwidth .... that's a bandpass filter you're talking about. A notch filter is used to attenuate a specific (usually problematic) frequency (frequencies) which is controlled by the Quality (Q). Engineers used to use notch filters to remove 60&50 cycle hum (depending if you're in North America or Europe) among other uses ... needless to say they're not used much anymore, nor have a "musical" use other than some cool filter sweep effects.
The method of carving out the vocals in a track is pretty much a useless battle. The thing with a good vocal (or any sound for that matter other than a pure sine wave) is that a lot of its character comes from octaves in the low and high end, which are not a part of the fundamental, which give the voice its characteristic timbre. Carving out those naturally occuring frequencies will thin out the voice so much that it wont even resemble itself when your done. Even if you could carve out a bandwidth in which the vocal is based, you would also need to consider one thing: if a reverb was used on the vocal, you would need to also know how the reverb was tuned, and how the reflections were EQ'd. If the vocal was mixed with a plate reverb that started to roll off at 10K, and you try to filter out all the way down to 4kHz, well, there goes the vocal sound down the shitter.
Basically, don't even try .... it's not worth the effort.
In terms of finding Acapellas, you just have to keep looking .... it took me a LONG ass time to get all the acapellas I have .... like years and years. And shit ... I haven't touched those in years.
And dude, having my Pro Tools certification in Post and Music .... if you're into writing in MIDI, PT isn't really where it's at for that shit ... you can do it, but there are better options .... Reason not being one of them due to bunk-ass sounding synths. If you are cool and have a Mac, Logic 7 is where it's at for MIDI ... there are earlier versions for PC available though.
Good luck though!
